The Festivities of the Flush
by
Cynthia J Dueringer - clean as a whistle!
Copyright 2022
At some wondrous yet inescapable point in your life, you will have a doctor recommend that you submit to a colonoscopy. If you’ve already had one, then you know the drill, but if you haven’t, you are in for quite a sensational adventure. And don’t worry about the expense, usually insurance companies will pay for at least one colonoscopy every now and then as punishment for spending their money on other medical stuff.
When you sit down with the appointment setter, she’ll nonchalantly explain that you will need to “prep” for your scope. Okay, you think, no big deal. I’ve heard about this. But (no pun intended), at this time, you are oblivious about what that “prep” word really means. If those appointment setters had fangs, hundreds of piercings, and tattoos of skulls on their necks, you’d get a better feel for what “prepping” actually means. But no, everyone is so pleasant, eerily pleasant.
After you set the date you’ll get the pages of instructions on how to prepare your colon to make it clean and pretty for the intrusion of the scope. We all try to look our best when seeing new people, so why not your colon? The general instructions are simple. A day or two in advance you eat light, soft foods, the next day you get clear liquids until late afternoon. Then you take a couple laxative pills and sip on the laxative drink, sort of like an afternoon cocktail hour. And that’s it. Simple enough. Now in olden days, you got a prescription for your prep drink. It was a nasty gallon jug of what tasted like battery acid. After a little research, it wasn’t battery acid at all. The main ingredient was polyethylene glycol which is used in industrial lubricants among other things. When they gave you the jug, just for fun you sampled a taste and were somewhat alarmed that it tastes like stuff that might be used in paint stripper or drain cleaners, well, maybe it is sort of a drain cleaner. But no, not really. The lubricant factor is apparently the main goal of the jug-o-joy juice and back then they added some baking soda, a little table salt, and a dab of potassium for electrolyte balance. And for that extra punch, a bit of an ingredient that is technically an ingredient in laundry detergent; sodium salts. Have you ever tasted laundry detergent? Maybe those Tide Pod eating lunatics have a taste for it, but for sensible folk, is not recommended to anyone that would like to keep their taste buds from base-jumping off their tongues. However, on second thought, I suspect that the laundry ingredient was a good additive for scrubbing out the inside of your intestines and getting them good and clean.
The polyethylene glycol is not only a lubricant, it also absorbs water. It will suck enough liquid out of you on its way through that your shins will sag like old drapes. Think about it as though the old gallon of go-juice was both a wash and rinse for your innards. I might add there were flavor packets we could add back in olden days if you think pineapple flavored laundry detergenty-lubricant sounds tasty. Once you were ready to drink the solution, you were stuck with having to consume the entire gallon...in an hour. That’s a two-ounce shot every sixty seconds. That’s hard to do with water. If that was two-ounce shots of rum, it might be fun, but the concoction for the prep tasted like laundry detergent/battery acid with a pineapple nausea about it. But all that is in the past!
There’s good news today. Forget the old fruity laundry detergent. Someone apparently decided it didn’t need laundry detergent, fruit flavors, salt, or baking soda. The go-juice came onto the market as plain, flavorless polyethylene glycol! Aren’t you thrilled? And you can buy it right off the shelf. Because I’m not looking for a lawsuit, let’s just call it the “miracle laxative”. It still uses the lubricant base product of polyethylene glycol like the old gallon drink, but it is flavorless and now you can choose a sports drink of your choice to mix it with to make a tasty Colonoscopy Cocktail, and it will be the polymer roto-rooter that will clean out your colon from your molars right out your tailpipe! And it will do the job like an exorcist ridding your guts of satan. Just think that this same product is used in the propellant that launches ballistic missiles from Trident submarines. Now you have some glimmer of knowledge about how this could work in ridding your colon of last week’s pot roast. Don’t worry, it’ll be fun!
But hold on, before you get to cocktail hour, your directions may tell you to take little pills first. They are very small and are designed to begin the laxative effect. You will probably be instructed to take two or four tiny little pills. They are so small you can barely see them. Ha, what could those teeny, tiny, impossibly small pills possibly do? Soften the way out? You laugh, but you will not realize when you see how tiny the pills are that very soon after swallowing those pills your belly will begin to growl, then become rambunctious, then it’ll seem like you’ve dropped two grenades into your stomach that are now entering your intestines before pulling the pin. When the pin is finally pulled, the blowback from those grenades will travel at lightning speed through all forty-five miles of intestines then complete its explosion out the other end. Hopefully you will be in an appropriate place when that happens. If not, hopefully, you can access a firehose for clean-up.
After an hour of unloading everything you’ve eaten in the past five years, you check the clock and now it is time to begin cocktail hour with the laxative drink you mixed for yourself, The Colonoscopy Cocktail. And the big bonus is that this new stuff is only a half-gallon! You can mix it with plain water then you’ll get a mostly flavorless solution that thickens a bit, sort of the consistency of mineral oil, so they advise you to choose a flavored water or sports drink but nothing that is red, purple, or orange. That doesn’t leave many colors left, so instead of having the flavorless okra slime feel, you will be drinking lime ooze, lemon sludge, or lemon-lime slime; you get the idea. The good news is that any way you fix it, it is slightly easier to gag down than the old gallon of laundry-detergent-laced-battery acid.
As you are mixing your pitcher of “gut punch”, you continue reading the directions and you find you have two whole hours to get this half-gallon pitcher down. That’s a huge improvement from the old gallon-per-hour. You only have to drink about a one-ounce shot every two minutes so you’ll have a little recovery time before the next couple of gulps. A shot glass is about an ounce and a half so it seems easy enough to manage. If you’ve chosen to fix the “go juice” with plain water instead of mixing it with a sports drink, it becomes a little slimy. So it’s more like drinking a shot of mineral oil or swallowing goldfish....just less fishy.
And that isn’t all...noooooo. After that day of light eating and having only clear liquids the next day, the evil little pills that started your flow-through affair now have your stomach calling out for help, but what are you going to give it? That’s right, liquid polymer! As you have guessed, empty stomachs don’t want polyethylene glycol, empty stomachs want french fries, steak, donuts, or chocolate ice cream, but you can’t give it any of that. So you will try to appease it with the "Let's Go Laxative" you still have in your pitcher, and you should know that when the polymer comes down, your stomach will be disappointed and angry and will want to punish you for it, just wait. The Colonoscopy Cocktail doesn’t taste too weird, so you pour a little into a cup and gulp it down. Your stomach grumbles at the incoming substance and you burp up something that tastes like exterior shellac. You glance at the clock and already it is time for the second shot. It has no real taste, but the smell of it reminds you of opening a new cheap plastic shower curtain. You can’t get away from your breath so you’ll get to enjoy that plastic smell for about the next twenty-four hours. Oh don’t worry about the ingestion of the polymer, its molecules are too large to get through your intestine walls, so it’ll sail right on out, not much different than when you ate the change out of your mom’s wallet when you were a little kid.
So your guts are still gnawing from hunger and slightly tensing from the tiny little pills, and now you are trying to drown it into silence with shots of ooze. And not one shot, noooo, but over sixty shots. You are pouring and gulping like a sailor that has been at sea for a year and finally found a barrel of rum. And just when you think you can’t do another shot without a few dry-heaves, you find you still have another ten or twelve shots left to get down. And even though you know what lies ahead you still feel a sense of accomplishment knowing a few more gulps and you will be done.
You just finish getting the remainder of the “go juice” down when a crabby rumbling comes from your guts. You’ve never heard your guts call out in distress like this so you look around your kitchen for a cat stuck in the cabinets. It becomes clear that your “back door” is going to open and most of your life is about to exit at 110mph. You hustle to the porcelain goddess, neither of you fathoming what is about to happen. Then in a weird way, there is semi relief as you relax your exit ramp and there is a mass exodus of the plastic slime and apparently a fifty-five-gallon drum of chicken broth. I believe the colon, based on how long it takes to empty, is not only about forty-five miles long but surely at least two feet in diameter.
You thank God that’s over. You clean up your splashes and try to wipe up the three-foot circle of yellow splats around the porcelain flusher and get yourself cleaned up, wash your hands and wipe the sweat off your face. You go back to watch TV and just get comfortable when about 30 seconds later another loud grumbling from your guts tells you it has an errand it needs you to run and you take off for the throne room again. This circling the drain feature will continue for the next six hours, leaving you feeling wasted, feeble, and appropriately, “drained”. You are usually allowed to drink water until bedtime, but every drop you drink races through like a cannonball looking for daylight.
Being prepared with the softest, fluffiest, most expensive toilet paper is a worthwhile investment. Even the softest stuff ends up feeling like 300 grit sandpaper unless you wet a wad of it first and lightly dab around your now tired, inverted launch silo, and dab very lightly like you are testing for nuclear launch sensitivity. Be advised, get more than one roll.
Somehow you make it to bedtime and maybe use a heating pad to hush the belly callings. Sleep? Nope. Not happening. If you think you might have a little gas, you jump and take a precautionary race to the bathroom so you don’t have to change sheets and take a shower at two am.
When you make it through the night, and you will, the glow of dawn tells you it’s almost time to go for your scope. Even as you dress, you are making repeated precautionary trips to the bathroom for a few last squirts of chicken broth before you head out. Don’t feel bad. Just think that everyone else on the GI schedule today is doing the same thing.
Arrival at the medical facility sends you through a maze of elderly volunteers that have little hearing capability so you nearly have to yell your name and why you are here while keeping your cheeks squeezed together as tight as possible. The others in the waiting room take pity on you and pray you don’t sit by them. Since you don’t want to miss your name being called, you don’t leave for the bathroom, you just stay put and pray that you won’t have to unload all your inner secrets again. So you wait. Finally, you are called and you navigate the maze of hallways with a “hospital scout”, another of the volunteers, to the GI Lab. The scout knows the hospital labyrinth well and proceeds to pound the linoleum at 47mph while you are doing the rush-shuffle trying to keep up and keeping your butt nozzle shut. When you see the sign “GI LAB” you think, ahh, finally, almost to the finish line. But WAIT...another waiting room. It’s getting to be a struggle to fight the urge, but you wait because you don’t want to lose your turn in line. You look at the others in the waiting room wondering if they are the scope-ees or the person that got stuck with driving the getaway vehicle. You finally hear your name being called. Whew! You get to your cubicle, where you take off everything, don the gown, and get suited up for your scope. So many questions they ask, it’s like preparing to be an astronaut, so pretend you are an astronaut for a few minutes of glory. So you sign this, sign that....were you supposed to read all that? If you did read it all, your colonoscopy will be tomorrow, so you sign, sign, sign. You’ll sign anything to get it over with at this point. You sure as hell don’t want any mistakes so you’d have to go back to “go” and start the whole prep business over again.
The doctor comes in to check you out, making sure you didn’t pay someone else to take your place. Your brain is shouting “let's get this show on the road already” but you act polite. Your butt is silently shouting the same thing but with more “raw” emotion.
Soon they come to wheel you down the hall and begin to hook you up to a bunch of medical stuff. They know the drill. You try not to feel slightly mortified when you get to display your back end to a room full of strangers as you realize that shortly your colon will be shouting, “INCOMING!!” So you drop yourself into their care...and in seconds it’s lights out.
Next thing you know, you are in recovery and people are talking to you telling you how wonderful you did. You know you didn’t actually DO anything, you laid on your side and went to sleep. But they tell you all went well and give you parting notes. As you get dressed you are thirsty and hungry and start thinking about food. It seems like it takes too long but they finally release you and tell you that you are clear to go. You wince a little at the word “go” but you are so relieved after fretting about the whole procedure for so long, and now that it’s all over you are moments away from freedom! You plunk into a wheelchair as one of the staff escorts you through the hospital maze as though this is the Daytona and your driver has pipe-dreams of driving in it causing you to have to hang on to the wheelchair arms and stiffen up your still slightly drugged neck to avoid getting whiplash flying around the corners, but it’s all good, you just want to get out to the getaway vehicle. As you are being helped from the wheelchair into your vehicle you are already having a little saliva squirt thinking about getting a huge juicy burger, golden hot fries, and maybe a shake as an extra treat.
You are mere moments from heading off to your favorite burger joint as they hand you your paperwork. And just before they shut the car door and tell you to have a nice day through the window and walk away waving "goodbye" they ruin it all saying, “we’ll see you for your next one in five years!” 💩 * * * * 2785 words1-2022
When you sit down with the appointment setter, she’ll nonchalantly explain that you will need to “prep” for your scope. Okay, you think, no big deal. I’ve heard about this. But (no pun intended), at this time, you are oblivious about what that “prep” word really means. If those appointment setters had fangs, hundreds of piercings, and tattoos of skulls on their necks, you’d get a better feel for what “prepping” actually means. But no, everyone is so pleasant, eerily pleasant.
After you set the date you’ll get the pages of instructions on how to prepare your colon to make it clean and pretty for the intrusion of the scope. We all try to look our best when seeing new people, so why not your colon? The general instructions are simple. A day or two in advance you eat light, soft foods, the next day you get clear liquids until late afternoon. Then you take a couple laxative pills and sip on the laxative drink, sort of like an afternoon cocktail hour. And that’s it. Simple enough. Now in olden days, you got a prescription for your prep drink. It was a nasty gallon jug of what tasted like battery acid. After a little research, it wasn’t battery acid at all. The main ingredient was polyethylene glycol which is used in industrial lubricants among other things. When they gave you the jug, just for fun you sampled a taste and were somewhat alarmed that it tastes like stuff that might be used in paint stripper or drain cleaners, well, maybe it is sort of a drain cleaner. But no, not really. The lubricant factor is apparently the main goal of the jug-o-joy juice and back then they added some baking soda, a little table salt, and a dab of potassium for electrolyte balance. And for that extra punch, a bit of an ingredient that is technically an ingredient in laundry detergent; sodium salts. Have you ever tasted laundry detergent? Maybe those Tide Pod eating lunatics have a taste for it, but for sensible folk, is not recommended to anyone that would like to keep their taste buds from base-jumping off their tongues. However, on second thought, I suspect that the laundry ingredient was a good additive for scrubbing out the inside of your intestines and getting them good and clean.
The polyethylene glycol is not only a lubricant, it also absorbs water. It will suck enough liquid out of you on its way through that your shins will sag like old drapes. Think about it as though the old gallon of go-juice was both a wash and rinse for your innards. I might add there were flavor packets we could add back in olden days if you think pineapple flavored laundry detergenty-lubricant sounds tasty. Once you were ready to drink the solution, you were stuck with having to consume the entire gallon...in an hour. That’s a two-ounce shot every sixty seconds. That’s hard to do with water. If that was two-ounce shots of rum, it might be fun, but the concoction for the prep tasted like laundry detergent/battery acid with a pineapple nausea about it. But all that is in the past!
There’s good news today. Forget the old fruity laundry detergent. Someone apparently decided it didn’t need laundry detergent, fruit flavors, salt, or baking soda. The go-juice came onto the market as plain, flavorless polyethylene glycol! Aren’t you thrilled? And you can buy it right off the shelf. Because I’m not looking for a lawsuit, let’s just call it the “miracle laxative”. It still uses the lubricant base product of polyethylene glycol like the old gallon drink, but it is flavorless and now you can choose a sports drink of your choice to mix it with to make a tasty Colonoscopy Cocktail, and it will be the polymer roto-rooter that will clean out your colon from your molars right out your tailpipe! And it will do the job like an exorcist ridding your guts of satan. Just think that this same product is used in the propellant that launches ballistic missiles from Trident submarines. Now you have some glimmer of knowledge about how this could work in ridding your colon of last week’s pot roast. Don’t worry, it’ll be fun!
But hold on, before you get to cocktail hour, your directions may tell you to take little pills first. They are very small and are designed to begin the laxative effect. You will probably be instructed to take two or four tiny little pills. They are so small you can barely see them. Ha, what could those teeny, tiny, impossibly small pills possibly do? Soften the way out? You laugh, but you will not realize when you see how tiny the pills are that very soon after swallowing those pills your belly will begin to growl, then become rambunctious, then it’ll seem like you’ve dropped two grenades into your stomach that are now entering your intestines before pulling the pin. When the pin is finally pulled, the blowback from those grenades will travel at lightning speed through all forty-five miles of intestines then complete its explosion out the other end. Hopefully you will be in an appropriate place when that happens. If not, hopefully, you can access a firehose for clean-up.
After an hour of unloading everything you’ve eaten in the past five years, you check the clock and now it is time to begin cocktail hour with the laxative drink you mixed for yourself, The Colonoscopy Cocktail. And the big bonus is that this new stuff is only a half-gallon! You can mix it with plain water then you’ll get a mostly flavorless solution that thickens a bit, sort of the consistency of mineral oil, so they advise you to choose a flavored water or sports drink but nothing that is red, purple, or orange. That doesn’t leave many colors left, so instead of having the flavorless okra slime feel, you will be drinking lime ooze, lemon sludge, or lemon-lime slime; you get the idea. The good news is that any way you fix it, it is slightly easier to gag down than the old gallon of laundry-detergent-laced-battery acid.
As you are mixing your pitcher of “gut punch”, you continue reading the directions and you find you have two whole hours to get this half-gallon pitcher down. That’s a huge improvement from the old gallon-per-hour. You only have to drink about a one-ounce shot every two minutes so you’ll have a little recovery time before the next couple of gulps. A shot glass is about an ounce and a half so it seems easy enough to manage. If you’ve chosen to fix the “go juice” with plain water instead of mixing it with a sports drink, it becomes a little slimy. So it’s more like drinking a shot of mineral oil or swallowing goldfish....just less fishy.
And that isn’t all...noooooo. After that day of light eating and having only clear liquids the next day, the evil little pills that started your flow-through affair now have your stomach calling out for help, but what are you going to give it? That’s right, liquid polymer! As you have guessed, empty stomachs don’t want polyethylene glycol, empty stomachs want french fries, steak, donuts, or chocolate ice cream, but you can’t give it any of that. So you will try to appease it with the "Let's Go Laxative" you still have in your pitcher, and you should know that when the polymer comes down, your stomach will be disappointed and angry and will want to punish you for it, just wait. The Colonoscopy Cocktail doesn’t taste too weird, so you pour a little into a cup and gulp it down. Your stomach grumbles at the incoming substance and you burp up something that tastes like exterior shellac. You glance at the clock and already it is time for the second shot. It has no real taste, but the smell of it reminds you of opening a new cheap plastic shower curtain. You can’t get away from your breath so you’ll get to enjoy that plastic smell for about the next twenty-four hours. Oh don’t worry about the ingestion of the polymer, its molecules are too large to get through your intestine walls, so it’ll sail right on out, not much different than when you ate the change out of your mom’s wallet when you were a little kid.
So your guts are still gnawing from hunger and slightly tensing from the tiny little pills, and now you are trying to drown it into silence with shots of ooze. And not one shot, noooo, but over sixty shots. You are pouring and gulping like a sailor that has been at sea for a year and finally found a barrel of rum. And just when you think you can’t do another shot without a few dry-heaves, you find you still have another ten or twelve shots left to get down. And even though you know what lies ahead you still feel a sense of accomplishment knowing a few more gulps and you will be done.
You just finish getting the remainder of the “go juice” down when a crabby rumbling comes from your guts. You’ve never heard your guts call out in distress like this so you look around your kitchen for a cat stuck in the cabinets. It becomes clear that your “back door” is going to open and most of your life is about to exit at 110mph. You hustle to the porcelain goddess, neither of you fathoming what is about to happen. Then in a weird way, there is semi relief as you relax your exit ramp and there is a mass exodus of the plastic slime and apparently a fifty-five-gallon drum of chicken broth. I believe the colon, based on how long it takes to empty, is not only about forty-five miles long but surely at least two feet in diameter.
You thank God that’s over. You clean up your splashes and try to wipe up the three-foot circle of yellow splats around the porcelain flusher and get yourself cleaned up, wash your hands and wipe the sweat off your face. You go back to watch TV and just get comfortable when about 30 seconds later another loud grumbling from your guts tells you it has an errand it needs you to run and you take off for the throne room again. This circling the drain feature will continue for the next six hours, leaving you feeling wasted, feeble, and appropriately, “drained”. You are usually allowed to drink water until bedtime, but every drop you drink races through like a cannonball looking for daylight.
Being prepared with the softest, fluffiest, most expensive toilet paper is a worthwhile investment. Even the softest stuff ends up feeling like 300 grit sandpaper unless you wet a wad of it first and lightly dab around your now tired, inverted launch silo, and dab very lightly like you are testing for nuclear launch sensitivity. Be advised, get more than one roll.
Somehow you make it to bedtime and maybe use a heating pad to hush the belly callings. Sleep? Nope. Not happening. If you think you might have a little gas, you jump and take a precautionary race to the bathroom so you don’t have to change sheets and take a shower at two am.
When you make it through the night, and you will, the glow of dawn tells you it’s almost time to go for your scope. Even as you dress, you are making repeated precautionary trips to the bathroom for a few last squirts of chicken broth before you head out. Don’t feel bad. Just think that everyone else on the GI schedule today is doing the same thing.
Arrival at the medical facility sends you through a maze of elderly volunteers that have little hearing capability so you nearly have to yell your name and why you are here while keeping your cheeks squeezed together as tight as possible. The others in the waiting room take pity on you and pray you don’t sit by them. Since you don’t want to miss your name being called, you don’t leave for the bathroom, you just stay put and pray that you won’t have to unload all your inner secrets again. So you wait. Finally, you are called and you navigate the maze of hallways with a “hospital scout”, another of the volunteers, to the GI Lab. The scout knows the hospital labyrinth well and proceeds to pound the linoleum at 47mph while you are doing the rush-shuffle trying to keep up and keeping your butt nozzle shut. When you see the sign “GI LAB” you think, ahh, finally, almost to the finish line. But WAIT...another waiting room. It’s getting to be a struggle to fight the urge, but you wait because you don’t want to lose your turn in line. You look at the others in the waiting room wondering if they are the scope-ees or the person that got stuck with driving the getaway vehicle. You finally hear your name being called. Whew! You get to your cubicle, where you take off everything, don the gown, and get suited up for your scope. So many questions they ask, it’s like preparing to be an astronaut, so pretend you are an astronaut for a few minutes of glory. So you sign this, sign that....were you supposed to read all that? If you did read it all, your colonoscopy will be tomorrow, so you sign, sign, sign. You’ll sign anything to get it over with at this point. You sure as hell don’t want any mistakes so you’d have to go back to “go” and start the whole prep business over again.
The doctor comes in to check you out, making sure you didn’t pay someone else to take your place. Your brain is shouting “let's get this show on the road already” but you act polite. Your butt is silently shouting the same thing but with more “raw” emotion.
Soon they come to wheel you down the hall and begin to hook you up to a bunch of medical stuff. They know the drill. You try not to feel slightly mortified when you get to display your back end to a room full of strangers as you realize that shortly your colon will be shouting, “INCOMING!!” So you drop yourself into their care...and in seconds it’s lights out.
Next thing you know, you are in recovery and people are talking to you telling you how wonderful you did. You know you didn’t actually DO anything, you laid on your side and went to sleep. But they tell you all went well and give you parting notes. As you get dressed you are thirsty and hungry and start thinking about food. It seems like it takes too long but they finally release you and tell you that you are clear to go. You wince a little at the word “go” but you are so relieved after fretting about the whole procedure for so long, and now that it’s all over you are moments away from freedom! You plunk into a wheelchair as one of the staff escorts you through the hospital maze as though this is the Daytona and your driver has pipe-dreams of driving in it causing you to have to hang on to the wheelchair arms and stiffen up your still slightly drugged neck to avoid getting whiplash flying around the corners, but it’s all good, you just want to get out to the getaway vehicle. As you are being helped from the wheelchair into your vehicle you are already having a little saliva squirt thinking about getting a huge juicy burger, golden hot fries, and maybe a shake as an extra treat.
You are mere moments from heading off to your favorite burger joint as they hand you your paperwork. And just before they shut the car door and tell you to have a nice day through the window and walk away waving "goodbye" they ruin it all saying, “we’ll see you for your next one in five years!” 💩 * * * * 2785 words1-2022
Another Warning: ☠ Medical Advice Disclaimer: This essay is written in fun by a humor columnist and author, a totally non-professional, non-medical person. This essay is not intended to give medical information or medical advice. If you or any other person you have ever met or known has a medical concern consult with your health care provider or seek professional medical treatment immediately. This essay is not intended and should not be considered, or used as a substitute for, medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. This essay does not constitute the practice of any medical, nursing or other professional health care advice, diagnosis or treatment. Get tested when advised by your medical professional and do not delay because of something that you have read in this opinionated essay in fun, or anywhere else on my website or on any linked materials.